Crop plants that are commercially grown today for various products such as seed, fruit, fiber and vegetables are developed by breeders through vigorous breeding programs. The breeder initially selects and crosses two or more parental lines, followed by repeated selfing and selection producing many new genetic combinations. The breeder can generate billions of different genetic combinations via crossing, selfing and mutations. The breeder has no direct control at the tissue or cellular level. A breeder of ordinary skill in the art cannot predict the products resulting from the cultivars he or she develops, except possibly in a random and a very general fashion. To put it in another way, the same breeder cannot produce the same cultivar twice by using the exact same original parents and the same selection techniques. Particularly, in the breeding of cross-pollinated species, each generation brings a reshuffling and regrouping of the genes. The resulting cultivars or varieties vary too much for accurate labeling. Therefore, the cultivars which are developed are unpredictable. This unpredictability is because breeder's selection occurs in unique environments with millions of different possible genetic combinations being generated within the gene pool, and with no direct control at the microscopic structural features at the cellular level and the nucleic acid level or the processing features. Therefore, even a carefully selected variety produces raw materials with non-uniform properties. Structural features of a product have direct bearing upon the product processing. For example, the energy required to peel or slice, dice or macerate a fruit or vegetable is functionally related to the microstructural components of the plant including cell wall density and thickness.
The Food and Drug Administration has mandated standard labeling for all processed food. This requires manufacturers to use uniform quality products and clearly label their product with the caloric, fat, protein and vitamin contents as a percent of the daily values of an adult 2000 calorie diet. The presently available cultivars although generally uniform, vary too much to label accurately.
For example, one of the difficulties with tomato products and food industry that uses tomato products is to produce products of constant quality, for example, products of constant color or constant shape. The shape of the tomato differs from one variety of tomato to another and changes in different seasons, depends on agronomic conditions, weather and location. At the same time, the presently available tomato processing systems are designed to process the best quality products, such as the most perfectly shaped tomatoes or canned whole peeled tomatoes, or red pigment of the tomato. These products must look perfect to the consumer and consequently the percentage of rejects in the various operations is very high and influences processing costs and the cost of the final product.
For food retailers such as grocery stores, the variability in size alone adds millions of dollars to the annual handling costs of produce. Fast food restaurants also spend thousands of dollars per day sorting different vegetables such as potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce to assure the uniform quality of their salads. Similarly, one of the difficulties of seed industry is to produce seed of constant quality. Plant seeds of essentially all varieties are often processed by one or more procedures (e.g., grading) to classify and/or reject the seed according to the grading requirements to improve their quality and utility for a variety of uses such as planting, oil-extraction, storage, and subsequent processing for the manufacture of seed-derived products such as animal foods.
Thus, the inability to predict the desired processing quality reduces the economic returns and influences the processing costs.
The genetic information in a cell directs cellular function and determines cellular phenotype in a given environment. Due to the advent of technology, a comprehensive genetic information of all expressed genes has become a realized goal by genomics approaches. Comprehensive genetic maps are being constructed for all the genes of crop plants. Indeed, agriculture is now well positioned to take its share of the benefits of genomics. The study of plant morphology, anatomy physiology, metabolism, genetic engineering, agronomy and biochemistry has also led to important insights into various biological processes and agriculture. It is now virtually routine to introduce almost any gene or set of genes into many crop species. Control of endogenous gene expression is now possible in plants through the phenomenon of cosuppression.
What is needed is that all of the rich knowledge from the above studies need to be integrated and correlated to cell and tissue structure and content, so as to predict structural features of a selected variety in a non-random fashion.
From the foregoing, it is evident that a process and an information system having the elements necessary to enable the reasoned selection of a raw plant product of a selected plant and/or the non-random selection of a crop plant that yields a selected raw plant product with uniform features is desired such that the selected product can be processed into a uniform quality end product.